CHARITY SCHOOLS

CHARITY SCHOOLS. During the colonial period, free education generally meant instruction for children of poor families. Numerous schools were established in the American colonies and were organized and supported by benevolent persons and societies, a practice that served to fasten onto the idea of free education an association with poverty that was difficult to remove. The pauper-school conception came directly from England and persisted far into the nineteenth century. Infant-school societies and Sunday-school societies engaged in such work. Schools were sometimes supported in part by rate bills, charges levied upon parents according to the number of their children in school (with impoverished parents exempted). Charity schools provided food, clothes, and lodging, if little more than an elementary education, to destitute or orphaned children.

Charity schools demonstrated the importance of religious philanthropy in the early history of education in the United States. They also exemplified the related urge to preserve social order through benevolent campaigns to raise the moral, religious, and economic conditions of the masses. The inadequacy of charity schools to cope with the educational needs of European immigrants in the mid-nineteenth century contributed to the impetus for the development of public schools and compulsory attendance laws.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cremin, Lawrence A. American Education, The National Experience, 1783–1876. New York: Harper and Row, 1980.

Edgar W.Knight/a. r.

See alsoImmigration ; School, District ; Schools, Private ; Sunday Schools .

charity schools on the English and Welsh model were a product of the movement for the reform of religion and manners that was a conspicuous feature of the Church of Ireland in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. These small schools were sponsored by individual landlords and philanthropists, by clergy, parish vestries, and municipalities. Reports cite nineteen charity schools in 1712 and by the 1720s there were several hundred. A society to propagate them was founded, but never played the significant role of the SPCK (Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge) in Great Britain.

The schools gave priority to nurturing the children of the Protestant poor in church formularies and basic literacy, and sometimes (helped by donations of money and equipment from the Linen Board) in aspects of linen production. A leading advocate was the Co. Sligo clergyman Edward Nicholson, who (1712) described charity schools as giving preference to orphans and ‘after the poor children of Protestants are taken in we fill with poor children of Papists’.

A shift towards a policy of proselytization developed in the 1720s (culminating in the state‐supported charter schools) as both church and state became aware that despite the penal laws popery survived and showed signs of resurgence.

Kenneth Milne